A policy-driven RFID event management framework

Abstract

As a tool of item management, the primary goal of RFID middleware is to transmit a series of filtered tag data to the RFID-based applications, and so it has to provide a means for specifying event-constraints to refine and filter the raw data from the associated RF readers. However, the current specifications, such as EPCIS's ALE, ISO/IEC's SSI and other vendor-specific specifications, are too circumstantial to be understood by the application developers, and also they have to get acquainted with the technological details of those various types of specifications. To alleviate these difficulties, this paper proposes a referential framework consisting of unified RFID event-constraint specification and its managerial mechanisms, and we dub it a policy-driven RFID event management framework. The essential components of the framework are an XML-based RFID event management policy definition language and a policy exchanging protocol. Through the proposed framework, it is expected for the RFID-based application developers to be able to easily specify their event-constraints without acquainting with the technological details of the current specifications.